This email was sent out to students registered for the Fall 2020 course. If you are not registered yet but interested in taking the course in the fall, please read the message below and submit the survey. Thanks!
Mail Sent
Date: Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 10:16 AM
Subject: cs3102: Welcome and Survey Request
Dear Theory of Computation Students,
Thank you for registering for cs3102!
We’re looking forward to the fall semester, as much as one can under these circumstances, and considering plans for the course. We are trying to figure out a model for the course that will provide a fair and engaging learning environment for everyone, and make the best use of your time as well as the resources we have for teaching.
The model we are considering is to partition the class into cohorts, small groups of students, that would have weekly meetings with one of the course staff (either us, or one of the TAs, with Nathan and I rotating around the groups), in addition to at least one weekly meeting without any course staff. We would use these cohort meetings primarily for learning, with students expected to present and discuss solutions to assigned problems, and the guides from the course staff posing questions and helping when students are stuck or confused.
Instead of traditional live lectures, materials would be provided that cover the concepts and techniques we hope you will learn, including the textbook, recorded video lectures, and other materials. The content we cover will be similar to what we’ve done in recent semesters (see https://uvatoc.github.io/ and https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~njb2b/cs3102/), and we will again use Boaz Barak’s excellent Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science book (freely available from https://introtcs.org/public/index.html).
Most of the learning in a course like this comes from working through problems, so there would be sets of problems assigned each week, and an expectation that every student in a cohort is prepared to discuss solutions to these problems (or at least your attempts to solve them) during the cohort meetings. These are meant to be low-stress and focused on learning, not evaluation, but over the course of the semester we expect there will be enough to fairly assess if students have learned and are able to use the main ideas in the class. This means the cohort meetings would be a required and essential part of the course.
Each week at the assessed cohort meeting, every student will be called on by a member of the course staff to talk about a problem from that week’s problem set. You will earn full credit for that week if you demonstrate sufficient understanding of key concepts (enough to make a reasonable attempt at solving the problem).
We want to avoid overburdening the honor code or disadvantaging students who may have a hard time finding a distraction-free environment for a fixed block of time, so plan to avoid having any traditional exams in the course. Instead, most of the assessment for the course will come from the cohort meetings. If you generally do well in these meetings, you can expect an A in the course. You will receive weekly updates regarding your standing.
To help us get started in planning the semester, we ask that everyone intending to take the class fill out this survey: https://forms.gle/XVSt47Kqjntot1wK8
We also welcome any general comments or ideas you have, either by email reply to this message, or if you prefer, you can submit them anonymously using collab, we won’t be able to respond directly to anonymously-submitted comments, though).
Thank you for submitting the survey, and we look forward to hearing from you and seeing you in cs3102 this fall,
Nathan Brunelle (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~njb2b/)
and David Evans (https://www.cs.virginia.edu/evans)
cs3102 Instructors, Fall 2020